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Installing aws-cli, the New AWS Command Line Tool

consistent control over more AWS services with aws-cli, a single, powerful command line tool from Amazon

Readers of this tech blog know that I am a fan of the power of the command line. I enjoy presenting functional command line examples that can be copied and pasted to experience services and features.

The Old World

Users of the various AWS legacy command line tools know that, though they get the job done, they are often inconsistent in where you get them, how you install them, how you pass options, how you provide credentials, and more. Plus, there are only tool sets for a limited number of AWS services.

I posted this brief mention of aws-cli because I expect some of my future articles are going to make use of it instead of the legacy command line tools.

So go ahead and install aws-cli, read the docs, and start to get familiar with this valuable tool.

Notes

Some folks might already have a command line tool installed with the name “aws”. This is likely Tim Kay’s “aws” tool. I would recommend renaming that to another name so that you don’t run into conflicts and confusion with the “aws” command from the aws-cli software.

[Update 2013-10-09: Rename awscli to aws-cli as that seems to be the direction it’s heading.]

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6 Comments

I ran "sudo pip install aws-cli" but my EC2 instance couldn't find the package.
At the bottom of the article I noticed you had recently updated the name so tried the old one of "sudo pip install awscli" and that worked fine!

It looks like a lot of the little bash scripts I was about to write just got a lot easier!

Great tip, thanks. I do use this in my .bashrc and can't live without autocompletion since the aws commands and options are so long to type. Plus it lets you get hints about what commands and options are available at any point.

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